Failure in friendships of all kinds is a frequent occurrence. In
particular, sexual failure takes us by surprise and dresses us down to size.
A student friend of mine whom I quoted in the Preface of this book put the
situation well in a letter to me once: 'How do we keep God at the centre?
I vividly remember when I started going out with Carole. My eyes were open.
I knew all the pitfalls! (I'd read about them). God was going to stay
firmly at the centre. We talked about it, even prayed about it, but in retrospect
it didn't happen. The trouble was that Eros, those human feelings which are
most like God's love and God's voice, seemed so much stronger, more imminent
and infinitely less demanding than God and were always imperceptibly edging
him out.'

This couple, like many before them and just as many
since their relationship disintegrated, went further physically than either
of them ever intended. Like many, many others they became riddled with
guilt.

Or I think of Pamela. Pamela had been married for
several years when, to her great surprise, she 'fell in love' with Joy, a
woman slightly older than herself. Although neither Pamela nor Joy would
have called themselves lesbians before this encounter, they both experienced
comfort from the tenderness of touch and excitement from the erotic nature
of their friendship. When, on one occasion, Pamela and Joy actually went
to bed together and were sorely tempted to bring one another to orgasm, Pamela
realized the situation was serious and reached out for help.

Again, my mind goes back to a student who asked for
help

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at a conference once, 'I'm always making a mess of my life and
blokes' lives by going too far physically. I don't understand what makes
me do it when I know I'll regret it afterwards.'

In this chapter we must address ourselves to two pressing
problems. What should Christians do when they fail in friendship? What should
Christians do when they fail sexually? In order to answer these questions
succinctly, I propose outlining ten procedures which provide possible ways
out of the guilt and oppression which plague us in the aftermath of sexual
failure.

Confess

The first thing to do is confess. Failure in friendship, painful
though it is, is not the unforgivable sin. Even sexual sin is not the
unforgivable sin. Whenever we become aware of failure of any kind, therefore,
we must confess.

Confession is telling God the whole sordid story as
we perceive it, tipping all the debris of our lives at the foot of the cross,
withholding nothing from our merciful God.

For some people, it seems quite sufficient to pour
out the whole sad story to God on their own, receive his forgiveness and
then to bask in that forgiveness. Because sexual sin scars the mind, the
memory, the imagination and the body, many of us need the therapy James describes
when sexual failure has caught us off our guard: 'Confess your sins to each
other and pray for each other so that you may be healed' (James
5:16).

I am not suggesting that you unveil your innermost
secrets before the assembled fellowship group or Bible study group. But I
am seriously suggesting that, if you have confessed on your own and still
feel confused, weighed down by the burden of past misdemeanors, or lack peace
with God, you seek out an adult whom you trust, who is discerning, wise,
prayerful, and who is capable of keeping confidences. I am also suggesting
that in the presence of this trusted person you pour your pain into the lap
of God remembering that God is well able to interpret all our methods of
communication: words, sighs, groans, tears and silence. Indeed, as Paul reminds
us: 'The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not

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know what we ought to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for
us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts
knows the mind of the Spirit' ( Romans 8:26-27).

When you have acknowledged and expressed your culpability,
regret and penitence in this way, the biggest blockage obstructing the path
between you and God is removed. You now have an amazing privilege: to stand
on the authority of Jesus and declare, in his Name, that you are 'Not guilty'.
This astounding truth may trickle from your head into your heart only very
slowly, but you must try to grasp the truth that God no longer looks on your
sin but on the crucified form of his Son, hanging on Calvary's tree in your
place. God concentrates, therefore, not on the sordidness of the confession
you have made, but on the fact that the account has been settled, the price
paid by the sacrifice of his Son's life. God therefore declares you
'Not guilty'. God sets you free from the death penalty and from the attending
guilt. You must therefore go free even if your feelings persuade you
that you are not yet free.

Believe

The second stage is to believe that the above facts about God are
true; to believe 1 John 1:9: 'If we confess our sins, he is faithful and
just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all
unrighteousness.'

Confidence that God has forgiven us sometimes comes
only gradually, over a period of weeks or months after the confession. You
know when it has become a reality when you can look back on the activity
which grieved God and, instead of wallowing in self-pity or self-loathing,
give thanks that this activity became a trophy of his grace rather than primarily
a sign of your disgrace. Give yourself time while God etches these facts
on your mind and on your heart.

Receive

When you have confessed and believed, you are free to rejoice in
God's free-flowing forgiveness. I sometimes think

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of God's forgiveness as a giant waterfall which cascades down the
face of a cliff in a hot and weary desert. I watched children bathe in such
a waterfall in Israel once. They splashed in the rock-pools and refreshed
themselves in the foaming spray. God delights to pour out forgiveness for
us. In gratitude to him, as well as from need and in relief, take full advantage
of this ever-available, renewing and renewable refreshment.

Be healed

When you have confessed, believed and received God's generous but
undeserved forgiveness, you are ready to receive another love gift: the gift
of healing. The sequence is not always clear cut as this, but all the elements
need to be present.

Whenever a person fails sexually, wounds are inflicted.
There is the indescribable abyss of abandonment you may have fallen into,
the assault on your self-worth, the searing of the conscience, the scarring
of the mind. It is no accident that the Holy Spirit is often described as
oil. Oil is a soothing ointment, and it contains healing properties. The
prayer of healing includes the prayer that the Holy Spirit would touch and
soothe and heal over the sexual sores that weep within. This healing balm
is available, yet what so often happens when we feel grazed from failure
is that we hide our hurts from God and try to pretend that nothing has happened.
We project to the world a capable, efficient, coping image and wonder why
we feel fragmented; why the hidden parts of us fall apart even though outwardly
all seems well. The reason, of course, is that we are walking around with
an emotional brokenness which restricts our life just as much as a broken
arm or a fractured thigh.

What we must do, instead, is to expose our brokenness
to the healing hand of God. Some people prefer to do this on their own. Others
invite a friend or counsellor or pastor as I mentioned earlier, not simply
to pray for their cleansing, but for their healing. Many would use a derivation
of the following prayer.

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'Lord Jesus. You see where I am hurting inside. Thank you that
my brokenness is not hidden from you but that you care about it. You care
about me. Just as the Good Samaritan came to the wounded traveller and bound
up his wounds, I ask that, by the gentle anointing of your Spirit, you would
come to my inner hurts like that. Cleanse the sores. Anoint them. Bind them
up. Then, would you pick me up so that I can begin living again, not in my
own strength, but buoyed up with yours. I ask these things for my healing
and for the glory of Jesus. Amen.'

Whenever we pray for such healing something good happens because
God both hears and honours such prayer.

The healing and renewing of the mind

But healing is bigger and broader than the canvas I have spread
before you so far. It includes the healing and the renewing of the mind.
Whenever we fail, Satan hovers around the scene of the crash and whispers
subtle, condemnatory lies. 'What a hypocrite you are. You can't be forgiven
for that. It's too late now. You've forfeited God's love but it doesn't matter
because his love is a strait-jacket, restrictive love anyway. You've failed
so many times, it's no good confessing again  go out and enjoy yourself.'
And our tired brain believes this voice; even confuses it with the voice
of the Holy Spirit.

We must remind ourselves at such times that the Holy
Spirit convicts. He never condemns. Learn to recognize the source of these
condemnatory voices, therefore: Satan. Stand against him and stand against
his lies, refusing to believe them. The friend praying for you can do this
with you. Tune out the lying tongue. Tune into the truth by asking, 'What
does Jesus say about me?' Read his Word, the Bible, to rediscover there the
consoling assurance that your failure does not erase his love. Read Psalm
51, for example and make it your personal prayer.

The healing of the memories

Even so, God's healing work may not yet be completed.
At

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the beginning of this chapter I gave a thumbnail sketch of Pam's
story. When Pamela came to me for help we talked about her childhood. As
we did, it became apparent that she had never really felt loved by her mother.
She could rationalize and conclude, 'She must have loved me
 she sacrificed so much for me.' But she could not recall ever
feeling the full warmth of the mother-love she had pined for.

We decided, therefore, to bring this lack of love
to God and to ask him to fill up some of the love-gaps which yawned inside
Pam.

As we prayed, Pam seemed to see a picture of herself
as though she were watching a replay of her life on videocassette. She was
a baby sucking her mother's breasts. But the breasts were empty. Pamela
experienced again the pain and frustration of sucking in air when she needed
and expected milk. That picture seemed to symbolize the entire mother-Pamela
relationship.

But as we continued to pray and to expose this deep
emptiness to God, Pam seemed to see a picture of Jesus coming to her, the
vulnerable infant. He held her. She snuggled into him. She gripped his big
but loving finger. He bottle-fed her with warm, nourishing milk and his holding
of her was tender, like the motherly love Pamela had always longed for. And
Pamela sensed an inner harmony dislodge the turmoil which had once wracked
her emotions.

That day, Pamela realized that, even though the relationship
with her mother had lacked certain ingredients of the emotional and physical
sustenance every child needs, nevertheless Jesus, the source of all true
love and sustenance, was attending to every deep-seated need of hers. Indeed,
the love of Jesus seemed to fill the gaps inside her in an almost physical
way. This is how she described it. 'One minute my life seemed to be like
an empty well. The next minute I watched the water-level rising. I knew,
as I watched, that this was the rising level of God's love. It was wonderful
to feel full rather than empty.'

I have related this account of Pamela's healing in
detail to demonstrate and underline the fact that God's Spirit and love can
seep into the crevices of our being; can even touch

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and heal those places where we have been wounded or neglected in
the past.

This good news is of great importance to the person
with the homosexual orientation, because it means that through the prayer
of inner healing, the Holy Spirit can begin to meet and compensate for some
of the lack of love in the past which forms the major blockage to full sexual,
emotional and spiritual maturation. This good news is of importance to the
heterosexual also: to the girl who, despite all her good intentions, lived
promiscuously; to the young man who admitted that he turned to sex entertainment
(by which he meant blue movies, strip shows and girlie magazines), in an
attempt to buy an intimacy he had never had. It is good news because it means
that there is a love which can reach right down to the forlorn and loveless
child who dwells within such persons, and provide the necessary love, a love
that can even be felt. I have not only witnessed these quiet miracles taking
place, I have also seen the effects such healing has on relationships. Take
Pamela, whom I mentioned earlier, for example. Her relationship with Joy
was transformed. In a gradual way, it became healing and wholesome, and mutually
supportive.

Healing is gradual

'In a gradual way....' The healing I have described is effective,
but its long-term consequences unfold only gradually. When you think about
the nature of such healing, this is hardly surprising. Through it, the person
whose growth was stunted through deprivation in the past is touched in the
place of hurt. If, like Pamela, that hurt stems back to infancy, it follows
that a great deal of learning has yet to take place: the learning we all
have to absorb through the natural maturing process. That is why change in
many of us is so slow. It is not that God is inactive but rather that he
allows us the luxury of slow learning. Instead of waving a magic wand, like
a divine Mary Poppins, and watching everything leap into place immediately,
God respects our privacy and individuality and simply provides us with the
ingredients for the growth which will result, eventually, in full
maturity.

When we have received such prayer, therefore, we
should

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look for every sign of change but not become despondent when such
changes seem slow and when, at times, we seem to take three steps forwards
and four backwards. Neither should we feel embarrassed about asking for prayer
for such hurts more than once. There is great value in what Francis McNutt
calls 'soaking prayer': praying for someone regularly until the healing work
is complete.

Forgive

But I do not want to give the impression that God does all the
work. Some needy people seem to present themselves and their problem to God,
wait for his prescription and the medicine and expect the magic of healing.
God's healing is not like that. It always involves our co-operation. And
one of the ways we can co-operate with the Holy Spirit of God is to
forgive.

The reason I mention this is because, whenever a person
has been deprived of love in the past in the way I have described, a certain
amount of resentment, bitterness and anger collects, like pockets of poison,
in that person's life. As the young man whose inner hurts prompted him to
seek intimacy through pornography admitted, 'Hate would not be too strong
a word. At times I really hate my mother.'

Forgiveness for such people involves setting the parent
figure free with a deliberate act of the will. Take this same young man,
for example. We encouraged him to recall, to the full, his parents' failure
in their loving of him, then to visualize them standing at the foot of the
cross with him and the dying Jesus, and to pray a derivation of the prayer
Jesus prayed from that same cross: 'Father, forgive them. They don't know
what they're doing.'

Such a prayer is wonderfully liberating both for the
injured person who prays it and for the person who inflicted the pain in
the first place. They are both set free from the bondage such negatives place
people in; free to make more effective and healing relationships.

Co-operate

Such prayer for forgiveness does not only apply to those
who

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know they have been wounded in the past. It applies equally to
those who have failed in friendship in the present, and to those who have
failed sexually. They too, must co-operate with the transforming Holy
Spirit.

Let me explain what I mean by this. It often happens
that when friendships flounder or when we have compromised our own sex standards,
we either condemn ourselves or blame the other person involved. We have already
noted the vital part confession plays, and that honest confession is always
followed by God's freely given forgiveness. What we now have to do is to
forgive ourselves and the person who has wronged or hurt us.

'How do you do that?' The girl who asked me that question
had been raped after putting herself in a compromising situation. The process
is simple but costly. It involves remembering the guilt and recalling the
pain. Without ever denying that what actually happened did in fact take place,
you ask two far-reaching questions: 'Will I forgive myself?' 'Will
I forgive him/her?'

The temptation, when faced with those questions, is
to bleat: 'I can't.' Gradually we learn that 'I can't' is not an adequate
answer, it is an excuse. There are only two possible replies to the questions
above: 'I will' or 'I won't'. When faced with them, therefore, we must struggle
and strive, wait and pray for the will to embark on the most exhilarating
part of the journey: to forgive. When our will has been marshalled into
submission, we then recall the incident which still causes pain or shame
and we pray our own version of Jesus' prayer on the cross: 'Father, forgive
them, they didn't know what they were doing.' 'Father, forgive me,
I didn't realize the full implication of what I was doing.'

This prayer is liberating because, when we utter it,
God performs deep surgery on us. Just as we forgive the former friend who
wronged us, so God forgive us. He comes to us. He lances the abscess where
the pus and poison of resentment and bitterness have collected. He replaces
these negatives with overflowing love: tenderness, compassion, understanding.
By helping us to see the horrifying situation

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from the other person's point of view, he encourages us to have
true compassion for them.

Receive God's grace

But what if we fail frequently? What if, like the girl who wrote
to me on one occasion, you have failed many partners? 'Each time I came to
God for forgiveness and had known forgiveness by him. Yet each time it made
a difference for a few weeks only... I really don't know what's going on
in me. It's not my intentions that are wrong, just what I do.'

We must never become blase and take God's grace
for granted. But neither must we despair. Rather, we will ask God to apply
his blood to the weeds which ravage our lives. Let me explain what I
mean.

For the past year, a huge weed has grown up next to
the honeysuckle which I am trying to train to grow around my dining room
window. When I asked my husband to cut it down, he looked at the girth of
the trunk of the bush-like weed, and laughed. 'I couldn't possibly cut that
down without damaging the wall.' Scornfully, I watched him water the offending
weed with a liberal supply of ultra-strong weed killer. A week later, to
my utter amazement, the once upstanding weed had withered. It has now shrivelled
and died.

I am not implying that a magic solution can be applied
to the soul which will eradicate our propensity to sin sexually or to fail
in friendship. As I underlined in chapter six, we are not God's robots, nor
God's puppets, but responsible adults capable of making choices. But neither
do I want to suggest that we must grit our teeth and conquer alone. To learn
to love, as we have noted all through this book, is to come to terms with
a complex art form. As Walter Trobisch reminds us so aptly: 'Love is a feeling
to be learned by grace.'1 Those of us who know we are weak,
who have experienced the humiliation of failure, need a liberal sprinkling
of the grace of God to saturate this area of our lives.

It is easy to wallow in self-pity or remorse or in
guilt feelings. This does no-one any good and is, in fact, piling one sin
upon another. Turn your back on the past and drink in, instead, the sheer
wonder of the love of God. Rejoice in it. Be awed by the sheer generosity
of it. Wonder at the vitality of it as you do when energy returns to your
body after an illness. This may take weeks, rather than minutes, but gradually
refrain from wallowing in your own weakness and fill your horizon with the
realization of God's overwhelming love, which eradicates sin.

Realize that God is bigger than your mistakes

Next, marvel at the miracle-working nature of God; at the realization
that God is bigger than our mistakes. It often happens that the memories
of our sexual misdemeanors crush us: 'I've scarred my girlfriend for life';
'I should never have gone out with a non-Christian. What kind of witness
have I been? How will he ever understand God's love after what I've done
to him?'

Thanks be to God, this failure is not the end of the
story. God is bigger than our mistakes. He does not have to unpick our lives,
or go back to the dropped stitch. No. Instead, out of the greatness of his
love for us, he weaves our mistakes into the fabric of our lives and even
makes them beautiful. Our responsibility, therefore, is to acknowledge where
we failed others; then, as though Jesus was in the room with us, to bring
the messy situation, and particularly the wronged person, into his all-capable,
all-loving hands and to leave them there.

It often helps, in this prayer of relinquishment,
if someone else is present when the final handing-over happens. You can pray
together that God will take full responsibility for the friend you failed.
If ever you have occasion to doubt that you completed this task, your confidante
can remind you that they witnessed the handing-over ceremony.

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Repent

But all I have said so far will bear little fruit unless repentance
reshapes our lives. Anthony Balcom says this of repentance: 'We should never
lure ourselves into imagining that to lament one's past is an act of repentance.
It is part of it, of course, but repentance remains unreal and barren so
long as it had not led us into doing the will of the Father. We have a tendency
to think that it should result in fine emotions and we are quite often satisfied
with emotions instead of real, deep changes.'2

Jim Wallis puts it another way. 'Repentance is seeing
our sin and turning from it: faith is seeing Jesus and turning towards
him.'3 Just as on Easter Day, Mary was challenged to turn her
back on the grave which once entombed Jesus and to fix her gaze on him, so
we are called to turn our backs on all that once held us captive and to focus
our love on him: to make him the pivot around which our world revolves. Until
we have done this, until he is re-enthroned, all our weeping and wailing,
confession and chastising will be of no avail. We have to be changed by Christ
from the inside out.

But when that miracle called repentance does begin
to reshape our lives, something astonishingly beautiful happens. It is as
though God creates from the seeming ruin of our lives a priceless pearl.
A pearl is the result of an accident. A pearl is the result of grit in the
oyster. A pearl is one of nature's glorious 'mistakes'. A pearl is
precious.

And such, by the grace of God, are we, not in spite
of our misdemeanors but because of the overwhelming goodness which is God.
As I have emphasized in my book, Growing into Love4, and
as Walter Trobisch reminds us, 'There is no life so messed up that he cannot
bring it into order. He can even make done things undone by his forgiveness.
For this is what forgiveness means: to make done things undone.5

The last chapter of this book was almost completed
when a student came to see me to talk over her seeming inability to make
lasting relationships. As we talked, despair in her turned to hope. God seemed
to remind us of the example Jesus set us. He seemed to remind us, too, of
the encouraging picture of ourselves which is painted in Hebrew
12.

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Since we have such a huge crowd of men of faith watching us from
the grandstands, let us strip off anything that slows us down or holds us
back, and especially those sins that wrap themselves so tightly around our
feet and trip us up; and let us run with patience the particular race that
God has set before us.

Keep your eyes on Jesus, our leader and instructor....
Look after each other so that not one of you will fail to find God's best
blessings (Hebrews 12:1-2,15 LB).

These are favourite verses of mine. They remind me of the Olympic
Games or of Wimbledon. They remind me that we are the players in the centre
of the arena and that this huge crowd in the grandstands, which includes
God, is on our side, willing us to win. Whenever we succeed, they roar their
approval. Whenever we fail, they call out: 'Come on. You can do it. We believe
in you.' And whenever we pluck up the courage to begin again, they show that
they are on our side: 'Keep it up. We're willing you to make it.'

Making creative relationships is one of the biggest
challenges that ever faces a human being. We never fully graduate. Nevertheless,
human friendship is one of God's best blessings. However much we fail, therefore,
we must never stop trying to make all sorts of Christlike
friendships.